Enhancing Security of Modern Software in Financial Services: A Case Study of a U.S. Regional Credit Union
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Application Security
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
- National Security & Defense
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Experimentation Automation
- Tamper Detection
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
About The Customer
The U.S. based regional credit union is one of the largest financial institutions dedicated to serving farmers and rural residents. As part of the nationwide credit system and with nearly 100,000 customers throughout the rural communities of the U.S., they work to promote growth and competitiveness in agricultural and rural communities across the country. This customer-first approach helps U.S. agricultural producers feed the world, strengthen the rural economy, and provide jobs that help rural families thrive. This financial institution is committed to evolving processes in digital transformation to meet the needs of its customers today and well into the future. In the current business climate, that equates to protecting its customers’ sensitive financial data with secure software solutions.
The Challenge
The U.S. based regional credit union, serving nearly 100,000 customers in rural communities, was facing challenges in delivering and securing modern software applications to protect customers’ private financial data. Prior to working with Contrast Security, the credit union’s application security efforts were ad hoc with periodic penetration testing and content analysis highlighting issues post-development. The credit union’s developers produce a significant amount of custom code that they release relatively frequently. Identifying vulnerabilities with traditional scanning tools was a challenge, as the tools generated a high number of false positives. The company also wanted to deploy Contrast in Dev/QA in order to identify potential vulnerabilities early in the SDLC and create a baseline. Additionally, prior to the installation of Contrast Protect, the credit union was potentially vulnerable to attacks.
The Solution
The credit union partnered with Contrast to increase its security posture and build upon its application security testing. Contrast helps the company’s developers to proactively manage custom code to mitigate vulnerabilities and risk, while preventing cyberattacks that could lead to a data breach. The company utilizes both Contrast Assess and Contrast Protect, as it evolves toward more rapid and automated Agile DevOps processes, across the entire software development life cycle (SDLC). Contrast Assess helped this regional credit union identify vulnerabilities in custom code and instruct developers on how to remediate them. Additionally, with Contrast Protect, this company can accurately block attacks in real-time, across all environments. Contrast Assess deploys agents via instrumentation that become part of the application portfolio to provide 24/7 monitoring. These agents are constantly assessing vulnerabilities in all stages of the SDLC. Contrast Protect provides detailed information on attacks, tackles issues associated with malicious activity, and stops unknown exploits using Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP).
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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